“Words are neither the problem nor the solution. They are the last evolutionary step in processing the feeling or sensation. They are the companions of feelings.
We cannot make progress on the third-line cognitive level alone. We can become aware of why we act the way we do but nothing changes biologically; it is like being aware of a virus and expecting the awareness alone to kill it. Our biology has been left out of the therapeutic equation.”
Dr. Arthur Janov
Unconscious stimuli have a pervasive effect on our brain function and behavior
This 2015 Swedish human study, performed at the institution that awards the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, found:
“Pain responses can be shaped by learning that takes place outside conscious awareness.”
Images of neutral male faces were used as conditioning stimuli which the subjects were trained to associate with levels of pain.
The concluding sentence of the study:
“Our results demonstrate that conscious awareness of conditioned stimuli is not required during either acquisition or activation of conditioned analgesic and hyperalgesic responses, and that low levels of the brain’s hierarchical organization are susceptible for learning that affects higher-order cognitive processes.”
From the study’s abstract:
“Our results support the notion that nonconscious stimuli have a pervasive effect on human brain function and behavior and may affect learning of complex cognitive processes such as psychologically mediated analgesic and hyperalgesic responses.”
Principles of Dr. Arthur Janov’s Primal Therapy related to this study’s findings are:
- Experiences associated with pain can be remembered below our conscious awareness.
- Unconscious memories associated with pain, when activated, have varying forms of expression as they pass up through our levels of consciousness.
- These memories, when activated, have effects on our feelings, thinking, health, brain functioning, and behavior that are usually below our conscious awareness.
I’ll use one of Dr. Janov’s 2011 blog posts, On Being Alone, to show an example of how the study’s findings of:
- “Conscious awareness of conditioned stimuli is not required during either acquisition or activation of conditioned..responses” and
- “Nonconscious stimuli have a pervasive effect on human brain function and behavior”
are seen through the lens of Primal Therapy:
| Unconscious memories associated with the pain of being left alone may be stored, especially in the developing brain, in our lower brain areas below conscious awareness: | “Pain of being left alone a lot in childhood and infancy, added to the ultimate aloneness right after birth when no one was there for the newborn. That imprints a primal terror where a naïve, innocent and vulnerable baby has no one to lean on, to be held by, to snuggle up to, to be comforted. To be loved.” |
| As we develop, the cumulative memories associated with the pain of being left alone, when activated, may affect our feelings, thoughts, and behavior: | “And that also has multiple meanings: no one wants me; there is no one there for me: no one wants to be with me; I have no love and no one who cares. One races to phone others so as not to feel alone. One runs from the feeling and struggles mightily not to be alone. Or, depending on earlier events one stays alone out of that same feeling. These are by and large the depressives.” |
| Although memories associated with the pain of being left alone may be formed in our early lives, they remain decades later, and can be activated below our conscious awareness: | “When something in the present occurs which is similar to an old feeling “I am all alone and no one wants me,” the old feelings are triggered off..and the whole feeling rises toward conscious/awareness where it must be combated. Either the person wallows in the feeling and is overwhelmed by it even when she doesn’t even know what “it” is. Or the compounded feeling drives the act-out, forcing the person into some kind of social contact.” |
A PNAS commentary on the study stated:
“Pain, analgesia, and hyperalgesia represent higher-order cognitive functions.”
and attempted to draw conclusions from this reasoning.
The commentator was incorrect regarding pain. I didn’t see where this study showed or even postulated that pain was always a higher-order cognitive function. In fact, the researchers cited a sea slug study and stated:
“It would not be surprising if vestiges of simpler nonconscious processes would also be operative under some conditions.”
Maybe it would have provided clarifications if the researchers specifically defined “low” and “higher” used throughout the study in statements such as the closing sentence:
“Low levels of the brain’s hierarchical organization are susceptible for learning that affects higher-order cognitive processes.”
http://www.pnas.org/content/112/25/7863.full “Classical conditioning of analgesic and hyperalgesic pain responses without conscious awareness”
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The thalamus part of the limbic system has a critical period for connections
This highly-jargoned 2015 UK study found that connections made by the thalamus of the developing human fetus had a critical period of the last trimester of womb-life. Babies born before the 33rd week of gestation experienced thalamic disconnections compared with normal-term babies and adults. The disconnections increased with a shorter womb-life.
The thalamus of premature babies also developed stronger connections with areas of the face, lips, tongue, jaw, and throat. They presumably needed these connections for survival actions such as breathing and feeding that aren’t a part of the last trimester of womb-life.
The study confirmed that the structures of thalamic connections of normal-term babies were very similar to those of adults. The study added to the research that shows that human limbic systems and lower brains closely approximate their lifelong functionalities at the normal time of birth.
It was difficult to measure the thalamus at this stage of life with current technology, and the researchers had to discard over two-thirds of their results. The researchers recommended monitoring these premature babies for difficulties in later childhood that may be caused by their early-life experiences.
Why would this monitoring recommendation apply to just the study’s subjects? We know from other studies that a main purpose of thalamic connections is to actively control and gate information to and from the cerebrum.
Would it make sense for a medical professional to disregard any patient’s birth history if they had problems in their brain’s gating functions or connectivity?
One researcher said:
“The ability of modern science to image the connections in the brain would have been inconceivable just a few years ago, but we are now able to observe brain development in babies as they grow, and this is likely to produce remarkable benefits for medicine.”
This study’s results provided evidence for a principle of Dr. Arthur Janov’s Primal Therapy: the bases for disconnection from aspects of oneself are often set down during gestation. The “remarkable benefits for medicine” are more likely to be along the lines of what I describe in my Scientific evidence page.
http://www.pnas.org/content/112/20/6485.full “Specialization and integration of functional thalamocortical connectivity in the human infant”
Do strong emotions cause our brain hemispheres to interact more closely?
This 2015 human/macaque study found:
“The functional coordination between the two hemispheres of the brain is maintained by strong and stable interactions.
These findings suggest a notable role for the corpus callosum in maintaining stable functional communication between hemispheres.”
The human subjects were asked to:
“Generate four negative autobiographical memories and create word cues that reminded them of each event. Participants then underwent a 6-min IR fMRI scan during which they were cued with the words they had created to recall the two most negative autobiographic memories generated outside the scanner.”
However, the study’s supplementary material didn’t address why the researchers used this particular technique.
Does recalling strong emotional memories that engage our limbic systems cause our brain hemispheres to interact more closely than do cerebral exercises?
This study demonstrated that including emotional content in brain studies was essential. It may have provided additional information had the researchers also used the two least-negative emotional memories.
As noted in Agenda-driven research on emotional memories, one hypothesis of Dr. Arthur Janov’s Primal Therapy is that recalling an emotional memory engages one’s brain differently than does re-experiencing an emotional memory. Asking the subjects to attempt to re-experience the two least-negative emotional memories may have provided data relevant to the study.
I didn’t understand why macaques were used as subjects. The researchers didn’t provide any tasks for the monkeys during the scans. The information this study gained only duplicated other studies.
Also, the monkeys were anesthetized throughout the experiments. An assumption that wasn’t addressed: fMRI scan data on anesthetized macaques provided comparable evidence to fMRI scan data on normal non-anesthetized humans who were recalling emotional memories?
Did the researchers use macaques simply because they were available?
http://www.pnas.org/content/112/20/6473.full “Stable long-range interhemispheric coordination is supported by direct anatomical projections”
Chaos – not balance – and competition for resources are the natural order
This 2015 Amsterdam/New Zealand/Cornell shore-life study found:
“Species abundances in natural ecosystems may never settle at a stable equilibrium.
Species in one of the world’s oldest marine reserves showed chaotic fluctuations for more than 20 years. The species replaced each other in cyclic order, yet the exact timing and abundances of the species were unpredictable.
Our findings provide a field demonstration of nonequilibrium coexistence of competing species through a cyclic succession at the edge of chaos.
Our findings show that natural ecosystems can sustain continued changes in species abundances.”
http://www.pnas.org/content/112/20/6389.full “Species fluctuations sustained by a cyclic succession at the edge of chaos”
The University of Amsterdam also participated in a 2013 study Evolution of microbial markets where evolutionary biologists studied microbes. Their related findings included:
“Cooperative interactions between individuals of different species.
Strategies important for microbes to optimize their success in potential biological markets:
- (i) avoid bad trading partners;
- (ii) build local business ties;
- (iii) diversify or specialize;
- (iv) become indispensable;
- (v) save for a rainy day; and
- (vi) eliminate the competition.”
A 2015 study How a well-adapted immune system is organized (the *.pdf file is linked because the html has errors) had a related finding that applied to our body’s immune system. The researchers found that the primary reason why each of our immune systems is unique is due to the effect of:
“Competition between receptor clones..NOT a biologically implausible centralized mechanism distributing resources system-wide.
The repertoire of lymphocyte receptors in the adaptive immune system protects organisms from diverse pathogens. A well-adapted repertoire should be tuned to the pathogenic environment to reduce the cost of infections.
Competitive dynamics can allow the immune repertoire to self-organize into a state that confers high protection against infections.”
Chaos and competition for resources are facts of life observed within ourselves and in nature from ocean life down to the microbe level.
Why are we often presented – as a fact of life – that what’s natural is for all aspects of our lives to be in balance? Emotional, economic, social, intellectual – you name it, we’re told that the natural model is one of “stable equilibrium.”
Two hypotheses of Dr. Arthur Janov’s Primal Therapy are relevant:
- Traumas early in our lives cause imbalances in our various biological and neurological systems.
- Using the principles referenced in An agenda-driven study on beliefs, smoking and addiction that found nothing of substance, a follow-on hypothesis is that our unconscious act-outs of our unfulfilled needs are one way we attempt to bring closure to these early traumas.
Trying for closure, though, becomes an act-out – a temporary fulfillment of a substitute need. But the underlying need remains unsatisfied, and soon drives further act-outs. Balance is never achieved.
With this viewpoint, can you see how behavior like the following shows the internal state of the actor as they attempt to thwart the natural reality of the situation?
- A person in authority who demands that people cease their competition for a resource and instead, accept what the authority figure determines is fair and balanced. An example is limiting supplies with price controls after a disaster.
- A person who disrupts cooperative behavior that provides a solution for the cooperators’ needs/wants and instead, interposes themselves in a directed solution. An example is requiring licenses for cooperative childcare.
- A person who insists that peoples’ responses to chaos to form an optimal adaptation cease, and instead, conform to some other responses. An example is prohibiting free movement after a disaster.
It reveals even more about the internal states of people that the above examples become codified. Children are taught that the natural and solely acceptable way to behave is in accordance with these unnatural solutions.
There are some signs that unnatural solutions in society can be reversed. For example, here is a 2013 article about a UK village that benefited from removing all of its traffic signals and reverting to the natural order of human cooperation and competition.
At the individual level, though, it’s up to each one of us to recognize and reverse our unnatural states. We and the people around us will be pleased when we and they are no longer adversely affected by our unconscious act-outs that are driven by our internal states. There’s enough natural chaos without adding more with act-outs.
Our internal systems will suffer damage, for example, when our unconscious act-out is to be busy, always doing something, and we can’t relax. Stress adversely affects our internal systems until we understand and reverse the driving unnatural states.
The prefrontal cortex develops more repressive function at puberty
This 2014 primate study found:
“The average magnitude of functional connections measured between neurons was lower overall in the prefrontal cortex of peripubertal [age when puberty starts] monkeys compared with adults. The difference resulted because negative functional connections (indicative of inhibitory interactions) were stronger and more prevalent in peripubertal compared with adult monkeys.”
The researchers found more inhibitory functional connections at the onset of puberty than during adulthood. This repressive functionality presumably develops at puberty because that’s when it’s relatively more needed:
“The bias toward increased inhibitory connectivity we report here for young monkeys might also be an intrinsic feature of human prefrontal cortex at a comparable stage of development.”
One hypothesis of Dr. Arthur Janov’s Primal Therapy is that repression is an important function that the prefrontal cortex evolved.
http://www.pnas.org/content/111/10/3853.full “Age-dependent changes in prefrontal intrinsic connectivity”
Agenda-driven research on emotional memories
I curated this 2013 study because one of the authors has made a career out of denying that people accurately remember and re-experience emotional memories. I’ll show how this viewpoint created problems with the study.
For background, one relevant hypothesis of Dr. Arthur Janov’s Primal Therapy is that there are differences in the levels of consciousness of: (1) an emotional memory; (2) the recall of an emotional memory; and (3) a verbal description of the recall of an emotional memory.
- The retrieval and re-experiencing of an emotional memory can engage our lower-level brain areas without our higher-level brain areas’ participation.
- The recall of 1 above is a product of our cerebrum in response to input from limbic system and lower brain areas.
- The verbal description of 2 above is a product of our brain’s language areas in response to input from the cerebral areas that recalled the emotional memory.
Clinical principles of Primal Therapy that follow are:
- A patient won’t re-experience an emotional memory when they only just recall it.
- It’s another level of consciousness even further removed from an emotional memory when someone describes their recall of the memory.
The researchers asserted that they studied emotional memories in one part of this study. Their method was to ask the subjects to recall and verbally describe the emotions they felt the week after 9/11/2001.
The researchers introduced factors to try to confuse the subjects about their recall of their emotions, and their verbal descriptions of their recall. The researchers were very sure that confusing the subjects’ cerebral recalls and descriptions produced evidence that the subjects’ emotional memories were changed and falsified.
Can you see how far removed the researchers were from studying emotional memories? They didn’t demonstrate that they understood how emotional memories were stored because they didn’t attempt to engage the subjects’ limbic system and lower brain areas.
Let’s illustrate the study’s inappropriate characterizations with an example. I burned my left index fingertip last week while toasting bread on an infrared oven grill. The pain is still stored with my emotional memory, and is probably why my memory is very clear.
I can recall the visual details of the grill, how my fingertip looked, the pain I initially felt, and the relief I felt when I held my finger under running cold water. I can retrieve and re-experience my emotional memory in a calm environment such as lying in bed with no aural or visual distractions.
Let’s imagine that the researchers analogously studied my burned fingertip accident. They would deny that I can accurately retrieve and re-experience my emotional memory of the accident if they could create problems with my verbal descriptions of my recall. For example, if I initially said that I pushed the kitchen faucet handle all the way in the cold direction, then after repeated questioning, I said that I wasn’t sure that the handle was pushed all the way over to Cold.
The researchers intentionally conflated the falsifiability of emotional memories with a strawman definition of false emotional memories.
They purposely misidentified both:
- The subjects’ recalls of post-9/11 emotions; and
- The subjects’ descriptions of their recalls
as emotional memories.
The study was designed to be lawyering, not science. The researchers DETRACTED from science.
Maybe their purposeful error could be overlooked if it was confined to this study. But it isn’t.
Imagine the damage this viewpoint creates when mental health professionals deny the reality of their patients’ feelings, experiences, and emotional memories!
http://www.pnas.org/content/110/52/20947.full “False memories in highly superior autobiographical memory individuals”
A possible link between stress responses and human cancers?
This 2015 UK rodent study found:
“An unexpected role for the GR [glucocorticoid receptor] in promoting accurate chromosome segregation during mitosis.
We also identify reduced GR expression in several common human cancers, thereby implicating GR as a novel tumor suppressor gene.”
One of the researchers said:
“Cancer is caused by cell division going wrong, but no one has previously looked at the role GR has to play in this process. It’s now clear that it is vital.”
From the study:
“Our findings now show that GR function regulates accurate mitotic progression, with clear implications for human health.
Add a previously unidentified perspective to GR action in cell division, affecting mitotic spindle function.
It may be that this action can be targeted by specific ligands, potentially opening up new therapeutic approaches to treat common cancers.”
The Translating PTSD research findings from animals to humans study also found reduced expression of glucocorticoid receptor genes, which appeared in some rodents after stress. Unfortunately, those researchers’ priorities weren’t to research the causes of this reduced expression.
One relevant hypothesis of Primal Therapy is that trauma in the earliest parts of human life epigenetically impairs the proper functioning of human development processes. A follow-on hypothesis is that the arrival of diseases in later life may be traceable back to the damage done during early-life development processes.
An example of this would be that a developing fetus adapts to being constantly stressed by an anxious and stressed mother. When the changes persist after birth, they may present as maladaptations of the infant to a non-stressful environment. These enduring changes may be among the causes of symptoms decades later such as over- and/or under-reactions to stress.
It seems possible that further research in these areas may find links among human stress responses and human cancers. The current study suggested that the glucocorticoid receptor may play a part in these links.
http://www.pnas.org/content/112/17/5479.full “Glucocorticoid receptor regulates accurate chromosome segregation and is associated with malignancy”
Is IQ an adequate measure of the quality of a young man’s life?
This 2015 Virginia study used Swedish data to find:
“Adoption into improved socioeconomic circumstances is associated with a significant advantage in IQ.”
The study’s all-male subjects were in 436 sibling relationships:
“..in which at least one member was reared by one or more biological parents and the other by adoptive parents. IQ was measured at age 18–20 as part of the Swedish military service conscription examination.”
One researchers said:
“Environmental effects have to be inferred, as in the rare event when pairs of siblings are raised by different parents in different socioeconomic circumstances. Swedish population data allowed us to find that homes led by better educated parents produce real gains in cognitive abilities of children they raise.”
The biological families’ situations had to be hellishly tragic in order to separate siblings and put one of them up for adoption. I didn’t find at what age separations typically took place, but can you imagine what the adopted child felt?
Let’s approach this study from the adopted boys’ perspectives:
- Children are very sensitive to caregivers’ words, body language, facial expressions, physical touches – to all the things that show them they are loved.
- A child learns at an early age from both implicit and overt expressions whether or not they are accepted for who they are.
It’s extremely traumatic for a child to be rejected for who they are. Consider this passage from Dr. Arthur Janov’s book The Primal Scream:
“Parental need becomes the child’s implicit command.
The child is born into his parents’ needs and begins struggling to fulfill them almost from the moment he is alive.
He may be pushed to smile (to appear happy), to coo, to wave bye-bye, later to sit up and walk, still later to push himself so that his parents can have an advanced child.
As the child develops, requirements upon him become more complex:
- He will have to get A’s;
- Be helpful and do his chores;
- Be quiet and undemanding;
- Not talk too much;
- Say bright things; and
- Be athletic.
What he will not do is be himself.”
All of the above can happen within a stable family.
Can you imagine what a child in an unstable family felt as they learned they weren’t accepted, and how they tried to adapt?
Everything these adopted children did to be accepted by their original caregivers failed. They were rejected by and ejected from the people who were supposed to love them!
Can you imagine how desperate these adopted children would have been in their new environment?
What wouldn’t they have done to be accepted?
The researchers made a point of cognitive development. But of all of the things that were important to the adopted child, that described his quality of life, does the finding of a higher IQ give even the slightest hint of his reality?
http://www.pnas.org/content/112/15/4612.full “Family environment and the malleability of cognitive ability: A Swedish national home-reared and adopted-away cosibling control study”
How well can catastrophes be predicted?
This 2015 study found a way of modeling catastrophic shifts that smoothed the processes with selectively introduced randomness:
“Most computer models created for the purpose of predicting catastrophes are based on deterministic math—that is, they assume a perfect world where nothing is random. That approach cannot work in the real world of course, because real catastrophes quite often have several contributing factors that are random in nature.
In real life, such events exhibit another common trait of catastrophes, a group of rapid transitions that come about due to a small change in a system.”
If this study’s findings were correct, it would seem that researchers who put together models that used deterministic algorithms to predict catastrophes may have been just expressing their beliefs instead of assessing reality.
There apparently are many researchers whose models incorporate catastrophes. A search on PNAS.org for “catastrophic” shows over 100 studies published since the beginning of last year.
In a related question: Does everything happen for a reason?
- If randomness is included as a reason, maybe things do.
- If randomness is excluded, then we’re back to beliefs instead of reality.
In perhaps an unrelated question: Can catastrophes be predictably avoided in our personal lives?
- Maybe most of them can, if we can eliminate sources of potential harm.
- Probably not entirely avoided, though, because of the randomness factor.
It’s difficult to have a balanced degree of concern about future harm. Here’s a view from Dr. Arthur Janov in his Primal Healing book p. 70:
“Worrying is not a problem, it is the symptom of something that is occurring physiologically within the brain. What causes the worrying is the problem.
Constant worry is anticipating catastrophe. But what we don’t realize is that the catastrophe already has happened; we simply have no access to it.
We are actually worried about the past, not the future.”
http://www.pnas.org/content/112/15/E1828.full “Eluding catastrophic shifts”
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Why is it so difficult to live your own life?
This 2015 Princeton/German study of fish schooling behavior reminded me of one of the difficulties an individual has in living a life of their own choosing. The study showed that the way social animals have evolved makes the individual likely to do what the group does.
Before looking at some details of the study, I’ll point out a natural pro and con of an individual going along with the crowd. A major survival advantage is that a predator won’t find it as easy to single out an individual from the group.
A major survival disadvantage is that a group is easily manipulated into a fate that each individual wouldn’t experience on their own. Here’s one instance of such an event:
Alfred Jacob Miller “Hunting buffalo” 1837
The difference in this study as compared with other literature on the subject was that there were a lot of equations presented:
“We demonstrate that we can predict complex cascades of behavioral change at their moment of initiation, before they actually occur.
Establishing the hidden communication networks in large self-organized groups facilitates a quantitative understanding of behavioral contagion.”
Does this sound like it could apply to humans?
“We define susceptibility as the likelihood of a fish responding given that it observes the initiator.
An individual will be more likely to respond (is more susceptible) if it:
- Is strongly connected to the initiator (short path length), and
- Has neighbors which are strongly connected to each other.
Shortest paths represent most probable paths.”
This passage definitely applied to humans:
“Such waves of evasion can spread extensively or may rapidly die out, resulting in a broad distribution of cascade magnitudes (number of responding individuals), a property shared with other spreading processes [e.g., neural activity, human communication].
In contrast to analyses of social contagion for online social networks, such as Twitter and Facebook, individuals’ proximity to the core of the network is not predictive of social influence.”
Schooling and herding behaviors are largely no longer needed for humans to survive in today’s world. However, these can be seen all day every day.
Why are such leftover behaviors still around? They are certainly misplaced from their original contexts.
The places and times in which these actions and reactions were relevant to survival have passed. They don’t make sense in other contexts in the present.
To lead to answers, purchase Dr. Arthur Janov’s 2011 book “Life Before Birth: The Hidden Script that Rules Our Lives” and read the passages listed in the index under the “survival” term. I’ll quote the beginning of a paragraph from page 52:
“What’s happening here is that the body, in the interest of survival, is continually reacting to imprinted memory..”
An individual may find it difficult to live a life of their own choosing due to external influences such as those presented in this study. There are also difficulties in living your own life that have other origins, as delineated by principles of Primal Therapy.
http://www.pnas.org/content/112/15/4690.full “Revealing the hidden networks of interaction in mobile animal groups allows prediction of complex behavioral contagion”
How do we assess “importance” in our lives? An example from scientists’ research choices
This 2015 Virginia study found that scientists preferred research projects that had the potential to make:
“Deeper vs. broader contributions.
The scientists surveyed considered a hypothetical broader study, compared with an otherwise-comparable deeper study, to be riskier, a less-significant opportunity, and of lower potential importance.”
What were underlying motivations for subject scientists to become the Big Frogs in tiny puddles?
For example, if scientists recognized that there was an opportunity to positively influence a great number of human lives with a “broader” study, such as the hunger research proposed in Do the impacts of early experiences of hunger affect our behavior, thoughts, and feelings today? why would they prefer a “deeper” study such as starving fruit flies?
These researchers said that “scientists’ personal dispositions” accounted for this finding. I agree, but not for any of the specific reasons they stated.
Subjects’ “lower potential importance” judgments were key, and bear closer examination. The study’s supplementary material showed this consideration was made on a sliding scale in response to a question:
“Would you describe Project A (B) as potentially very important?”
The “lower potential importance” finding was an accumulation of each scientist’s personal judgment of a project described as:
“A broad project that spans several topical domains, including at least one that coincides with your area(s) of expertise and interest.
compared with:
“A focused and specialized project that fits your particular interests and leverages your deep expertise in a specific area.”
Weren’t personal judgments of the hypothetical project’s “potentially very important” aspect how each scientist predicted the project would make them feel important?
Given vague project descriptions in above quotations, I assert that their judgments’ contexts were “important to me” rather than “important to science” or “important to society” or important to some other context.
A relevant hypothesis of Dr. Arthur Janov’s Primal Therapy that applies to the “lower potential importance” finding is: the need to feel important is a defense against feeling unimportant due to early experiences of neglect.
Using principles referenced in the hunger post, the need to feel important is:
- A derivative need;
- A substitute for an unfulfilled need; and
- Caused by the impact of an early unmet need.
A corollary is that if an infant didn’t have early experiences of neglect, and their early needs were met, they likely wouldn’t develop derivative needs such as the need to feel important as they progressed through childhood, adolescence, and adulthood.
Are people motivated to act like the scientists who were subjects of this study? Do we make career and personal choices based on whether or not our work and other people make us feel important?
See my Welcome page and Scientific evidence page for further elaborations of this topic.
http://www.pnas.org/content/112/12/3653.full “Different personal propensities among scientists relate to deeper vs. broader knowledge contributions”
Do the impacts of early experiences of hunger affect our behavior, thoughts, and feelings today?
This 2015 worldwide human study Hunger promotes acquisition of nonfood objects found that people’s current degree of hungriness affected their propensity to acquire nonfood items.
The researchers admitted that they didn’t demonstrate cause and effect with the five experiments they performed, although the findings had merit. News articles poked good-natured fun at the findings with headlines such as “Why Hungry People Want More Binder Clips.”
The research caught my eye with these statements:
“Hunger’s influence extends beyond food consumption to the acquisition of nonfood items that cannot satisfy the underlying need.
We conclude that a basic biologically based motivation can affect substantively unrelated behaviors that cannot satisfy the motivation.”
The concept of the quotes relates to a principle of Dr. Arthur Janov’s Primal Therapy – symbolic satisfaction of needs.
I stated two fundamentals of Primal Therapy in An agenda-driven study on beliefs, smoking and addiction that found nothing of substance:
- The physiological impacts of our early unmet needs drive our behavior, thoughts, and feelings.
- The painful impacts of our unfulfilled needs impel us to be constantly vigilant for some way to fulfill them.
Corollary principles of Primal Therapy are:
- Our present efforts to fulfill our early unmet needs will seldom be satisfying. It’s too late.
- We acquire substitutes now for what we really needed back then.
- Acquiring these symbols of our early unmet needs may, at best, temporarily satisfy derivative needs.
But the symbolic satisfaction of derived needs – the symptoms – never resolves the impacts of early unfulfilled needs – the motivating causes:
- We repeat the acquisition behavior, and get caught in a circle of acting out our feelings and impulses driven by these conditions.
- The unconscious act-outs become sources of misery both to us and to the people around us.
In his book “Primal Healing” Dr. Arthur Janov gives two examples of critical periods only during which early needs can be satisfied:
- Being touched in the first months of life is crucial to a child’s development. The lack of close contact after the age of 5 wouldn’t have the same effect.
- Conversely, the need for praise at 6 months of age may not be essential, but it’s crucial for children at age 5.
As this study’s finding showed, there’s every reason for us to want researchers to provide a factual blueprint of causes for our hunger sensation effects, such as “unrelated behaviors that cannot satisfy the motivation.”
Why not start with hunger research? Objectives of the research should include answering:
- What enduring physiological changes occurred as a result of past hunger?
- How do these changes affect the subjects’ present behaviors, thoughts, and feelings?
Hunger research that would likely provide causal evidence for the effect of why people acquire “items that cannot satisfy the underlying need” should include studying where to start the timelines for the impacts of hunger. The impacts would potentially go back at least to infancy when we were completely dependent on our caregivers.
Infants can’t get up to go to the refrigerator to satisfy their hunger. All a hungry infant can do is call attention to their need, and feel pain from the deprivation of their need.
Is infancy far back enough, though, to understand the beginnings of potential impacts of hunger? The Non-PC alert: Treating the mother’s obesity symptoms positively affects the post-surgery offspring study referenced an older study of how the hunger of mothers-to-be had lifelong ill effects for the fetuses they carried during the Dutch hunger winter of 1944. The exposed children had epigenetic DNA changes from their mothers’ starvation, which resulted in relative obesity compared with their unexposed siblings.
An agenda-driven study on beliefs, smoking and addiction that found nothing of substance
The researchers of this 2014 Virginia Tech study said that they found something profound about beliefs and the brain and addiction and smoking.
I’ll assert the short versions of some relevant understandings before assessing the study.
1) A principle of Dr. Arthur Janov’s Primal Therapy is: we all have needs that start at the beginning of our lives. Our needs change as we grow.
If our basic needs aren’t satisfied anywhere along the way, we feel pain.
When the unmet needs are early in our lives and the painful conditions persist, enduring physiological changes may occur.
This basic truth is supported by the findings of much of the recent research I’ve curated on this blog, the references in those studies, and older research elsewhere.
2) Another fundamental of Primal Therapy is that the physiological impacts of these unmet needs drive our behavior, thoughts, and feelings.
The painful impacts of our unfulfilled needs impel us to be constantly vigilant for some way to fulfill them.
This is a richly insightful and truly empathetic method of interpreting people’s behaviors and expressions of thoughts and feelings.
3) A hypothesis of Primal Therapy is: a major function that our cerebrums have evolutionarily adapted is to use ideas and beliefs to repress pain and make us more comfortable.
I value this inference as an empathetic method of interpreting people’s expressions of thoughts and feelings. Click the Beliefs category to view samples of how beliefs, expectations, and predictions are studied using cerebral measurements.
So – what did this study contribute to science about beliefs and the underlying causes of addiction and smoking as found by measuring the subjects’ brains?
Nothing new, really. The study was all about the effects, the symptoms. There was nothing about:
- Impelling physical conditions and causes,
- What primarily drives people’s beliefs and addiction behaviors, and
- What may permanently help someone with their need for the next cigarette.
I wonder what the study’s reviewer saw that factually advanced science.
Everybody already knew that beliefs can temporarily substitute for addicting substances, as well as temporarily change behaviors. It’s a foundation of AA and detox centers.
It’s also a foundation of AA and detox centers that these beliefs have to be constantly reinforced. That fact in and of itself demonstrates that underlying causes aren’t addressed in the AA and detox center approaches. The symptoms always bubble up, and require thought remedies and other interventions in order to stay suppressed.
The research provided details about an approach that wasn’t capable of anything more than temporarily suppressing symptoms. What does the following quote from the Significance statement sound like to you?
“Our findings suggest that subjective beliefs can override the physical presence of a powerful drug like nicotine by modulating learning signals processed in the brain’s reward system.”
Any human therapeutic approach won’t supply the addicting substance. That leaves just beliefs and their required constant reinforcement.
The unsupported overconfidence of the researchers that:
“The implications of these findings may be far ranging”
led to one of the most ridiculous statements I’ve seen in a while:
“Just as drugs micromanage the belief state,” Montague said, “maybe we can micromanage beliefs to better effect behavior change in addiction.”
This hubris just added to the stench of an agenda.
Since smoking isn’t politically correct, I’d guess that it wasn’t that difficult for this study to be funded and promoted. It apparently wasn’t an obstacle that the research DETRACTED from science and didn’t really help people.
http://www.pnas.org/content/112/8/2539.full “Belief about nicotine selectively modulates value and reward prediction error signals in smokers”
Dr. Arthur Janov interview on his 2011 book Life Before Birth: The hidden script that rules our lives
Dr. Arthur Janov’s 2011 book “Life Before Birth: The hidden script that rules our lives” describes problems that start in the earliest parts of our lives, when epigenetic changes due to trauma in the womb affect our development.
“The science has changed. When I first started out 44 years ago, there was nobody who could understand it, or agree, especially the professionals. Now all, or a great deal of the current research, is backing up everything I say.
I’m saying that this therapy is really a matter of life and death now. I should probably start at the beginning and say that there’s trauma in the womb. We need to set back the clock so that we take account of trauma that occurs while our mother is carrying that has lifelong consequences for how long we live, for example. There’s a current research study that shows that as you get more traumatized in the womb, your life expectancy is much shorter.
When you get rid of the childhood pain that happened way back when – and there are ways to do it – you will live much longer. So truly, a proper therapy now is a matter of life and death. Not only because your life expectancy is shorter when you have trauma, but you get sick earlier, you have diabetes, Alzheimer’s, all kinds of diseases on your way to your death, which makes life very uncomfortable.
But that’s just part of what we do. The idea is that we found a way to take the pain out of the system, going all the way back. And what we’re finding is that pain starts way, way earlier than we thought.
I used to think that the greatest point was the birth trauma. Well that’s no longer true. Way before the birth trauma there are traumas from the smoking mothers, the anxious mothers, the depressed mothers, that have lifelong effects on the baby, the offspring.”
“https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbUhjZhpEyct”
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Surface Your Real Self 